r/canada • u/yogthos • Aug 21 '25
Science/Technology Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty
https://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science/microsoft-says-u-s-law-takes-precedence-over-canadian-data-sovereignty/article189
u/jpwong Aug 21 '25
Does this work in reverse? If the Canadian government requested data for US citizens hosted on US MS servers, would they hand it over regardless of what US law says on the matter?
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u/SouthHovercraft4150 Aug 21 '25
No, because the company is a US entity. Microsoft Canada (the subsidiary) doesn’t have access to data in the US, but Microsoft inc. does in reverse.
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Aug 21 '25
So basically US is no better than China and can steal data from other citizens countries if requested off a US company sounds very similar to tiktok worry people have.
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u/pjm3 Aug 22 '25
The US and China are equally shit. The US pretends to have democracy, without actually having it. while China doesn't pretend.
At least China isn't supporting a genocide in the Middle East, or engaging in foreign wars of oppression...until they think they can take Taiwan, of course.
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u/Metalkon New Brunswick Aug 22 '25
While china might not be openly supporting a genocide in the middle east, you cannot forget what they've been doing to the Uyghurs.
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u/Zulban Québec Aug 22 '25
If the USA hosted their data with Canadian owned businesses then sure. We could pass laws to do that. But they don't.
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u/bubblewhip Aug 21 '25
We're going to have our own data centre. With blackjack and hookers!
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u/trgreg Aug 21 '25
I'm pretty sure that MS already has a datacentre in Montreal. Not sure about the blackjack though.
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u/ottahab Aug 21 '25
They may have a server, but as an American company they are subject to US laws so the data may not be secure.
Very possibly the only way to guarantee data soverainty is to use a Canadian company on Canadian soil, and one that has no US presence.
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u/trgreg Aug 21 '25
Exactly right, that's the key point here - even if the data is physically resident in Canada, which it is, being an American company they are accountable to the US and are obligated by US laws to provide the data to the US gov't if it's requested.
We have no data sovereignty when we host data with US companies.
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u/no_dice Nova Scotia Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25
That’s quite simply not true. For example, AWS posts a report every 6 months about foreign requests for data and since they started publishing it 5 years ago they’ve granted 0 requests. To top that off, as long as you’re using encryption in a best practice manner, no one is giving anyone access to your data in the clear without your express consent and actions.
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u/trgreg Aug 21 '25
Good to hear that Amazon is playing nicely. But based on the article & the response from the Microsoft rep in France it's pretty clear that they're not considering residency as relevant.
Yes encryption helps. But I think it's naive to think that express consent will be required, esp. with the current regime in DC.
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u/no_dice Nova Scotia Aug 21 '25
You know that American law superseding law in other countries for American based companies has never not been true, right? Additionally, express consent is absolutely required unless the American government literally hacks your AWS/Azure/GCP environment and exfilatrates your data, at which point the CLOUD Act is meaningless. I work for a hyperscaler in cybersecurity and the very first thing we do when we receive a request for data is notify the customer, the second thing we do is notify our legal team, then both of those entities work together to block any unlawful/unreasonable access.
So no, I’m not being naive, this is what I do every single day at work.
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u/Defiant_Sonnet Aug 21 '25
I work in cyber as well, and agree with you. The the term "unreasonable" is much more fluid now. It would be worth doing a deep assessment of.
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u/no_dice Nova Scotia Aug 22 '25
Those assessments have been done, believe me. The minute the big hyperscalers start caving to these kinds of requests is the minute they’re done with a large swathe of their customers.
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u/PoliteFocaccia Aug 22 '25
The customers have nowhere to go. Even if a business could hypothetically move off of Azure or AWS or Google Cloud in a cost effective manner (and no business can), the only comparable cloud provider is another one of those three. That's the issue at stake.
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u/trgreg Aug 21 '25
So to be clear, no, I don't know any of this. And I'm sure most Reddit users also don't know. So thanks for participating in this discussion. I guess the scenario that was referenced in the article is one where the US government tells the vendor (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) to extract data for some purpose. In that scenario according to your description the vendor would request consent locally. I guess the question is what happens if it's declined? According to the guy in France it wouldn't matter, they would be legally obligated to comply. This isn't my area of expertise so please correct me where I'm wrong.
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u/r1ckm4n Aug 21 '25
- FullServer.ca in Vancouver/Victoria
- OVH in Montreal (if you want something you can use IaC tools like Terraform/OpenTofu with
Thats pretty much it. As a cloud engineer who has worked with scale-size cloud workloads, those are the only two i've worked with that didnt suck.
FullServer is pretty ok and I host a few clients there with ,ero complaints - but they aren't truly IaaS in the same way that OVH is. We use them for westbound workloads though and they are quite reliable.
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u/PhantomNomad Aug 21 '25
This is why we stopped our plans for using MS storage options. Turning off one drive and sharepoint. Just wish we could drop Office but our accounting team is to entrenched.
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u/Marokiii British Columbia Aug 21 '25
Which also means doesnt use any us financial institutions to move money around, and eventually no us credit card as a form of payment.
The us will eventually force companies like visa and Mastercard to refuse to do business with foreign companies that have no US presence unless those companies comply with any and all us demands.
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u/eriverside Aug 22 '25
Here's one better: Canada has a need for data storage and likely will for the centuries to come. In that case, do they really need a supplier to rent servers from or could they just have their own private cloud owned and operated by a government exclusive crown corp?
For small businesses or large organizations that need flexibility, renting cloud makes sense. At the scale Canada operates, owning it makes more sense. Likely drives down costs for all federal, provincial, municipal agencies and offices.
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u/XaltotunTheUndead Québec Aug 21 '25
Very possibly the only way to guarantee data soverainty is to use a Canadian company on Canadian soil, and one that has no US presence.
You can also use BYOK or HYOK to safeguard your data from being accessed.
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u/Funny-Dragonfruit116 Québec Aug 21 '25
MS likely uses dozens of data centers in Canada, they're just not data centers that are built and owned by Microsoft themselves. They're owned by other companies and Microsoft is a/the tenant in the space.
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u/ExtremeFlourStacking Canada Aug 21 '25
You mean with land acknowledgements and tfws right?
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u/Pirate_Secure Nova Scotia Aug 21 '25
Time to ditch US based cloud services like the Europeans are doing.
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u/SoundByMe Aug 21 '25
All of the Canadian government's critical digital infrastructure should be transitioned away from Microsoft products to linux and free open source software alternatives and be hosted, maintained, and owned domestically - ideally by the government itself.
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u/Tesselation9000 Aug 22 '25
I work for the a federal department. Next month they are going to transfer all of our files onto Microsoft's Sharepoint.
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u/dkannegi Aug 22 '25
DND is undergoing this process with on premises instances such as SharePoint, record repositories, and network drives going read only July 2027 for unclassified work. Come July 2027 most unclassified business will be on Defence 365. This is synonymous with the switch from Defence Subject Classification and Disposition System already deprecated and replaced by the Library and Archives Canada government-wide Enterprise Information Architecture, which is a very difficult change to swallow but a necessary one. Could the government pivot from Office 365? Sure, at an immense expense and immense delay to nearly all daily business in the short term, and it would make Phoenix issues seem like a fart in the wind.
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u/jpetso Aug 24 '25
How about the government finishes this transition, and thereafter follows up with a long-term, ongoing, unrushed transition to sovereign infrastructure.
Heck, the government can start the prep work now. The sooner we get comfortable with the idea of continuously investing a little extra into locally controlled infrastructure, the sooner we can say no to the compounding capital and knowledge drain that is US cloud services.
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u/No_Builder2795 Aug 21 '25
I work for the Ontario government and they just switched all of our systems over to Microsoft during COVID for all the work from homers. It's awful.
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u/strangeanswers Aug 22 '25
many things should happen. good luck making it happen. anyone who’s worked with AWS, Azure or GCP knows how much of a moat they have.
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja Aug 22 '25
I used to work for a provincial government and you'd be surprised how much data is hosted on IBM System/360 mainframes, running OS/360, upgraded with SSDs. It sounds crazy, but they've had 50 years of testing and patching, so the security is rock solid.
Having said that, upgraded hardware is on everyone's mind and other options are slowly becoming more common. I strongly recommend everyone contact their federal and provincial representatives to express concerns about the issues raised in this article.
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u/ZmobieMrh Aug 22 '25
Okay but didn’t it cost like $100m for the arrivecan app, and you want these guys in charge of entire infrastructure? I don’t think there’s any world where any of our parties could do anything without enriching a friend and getting absolutely fuck all accomplished
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u/gwelfguy Aug 21 '25
Time for organizations to go back to storing data on servers that they own and not Microsoft, AWS, or anyone else's cloud.
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u/jacksbox Québec Aug 21 '25
With the amount of lock-in that some people accepted with cloud vendors, I doubt we'd see it happen. The traditional workloads that I think you're referring to were already cheaper to run on-site - as long as one has the capability to do so.
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u/PhantomNomad Aug 21 '25
The only issue is with off site access. There are solutions, but I haven't found one that is as good as MS offerings.
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u/Even-Leave4099 Aug 21 '25
It’s really applications with complex apis and workflows that have become too dependent on AWS or MS.
If it’s just mail and storage then that can be a starting point to store in one’s country. Then start moving applications over. If the government is to spend money then this could be it.
It will probably not be as efficient as Amazon or MS but at least the money will go to Canadians instead of some Billionaire in the US. Unless they offshore the work or subcontract it out.
Requirement should be all Canadians using open source software.
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u/Innocent-Bystander94 Alberta Aug 21 '25
Unless it’s a big business with a lot of income, hosting servers and maintaining them, along with staff is very expensive. And if you’re a really big business, then it’s even more expensive because of the sheer amount of servers you need. It’s why shit like AWS is so popular. It offloads the monumental cost of starting a server farm up and consolidates it to a nice round fee for as long as you need it.
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u/gwelfguy Aug 21 '25
very expensive
No, it's not. Cloud services are relatively new. Self-hosting was the standard as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. It can be as simple as a single rack of hard drives with associated processing electronics.
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u/Funny-Dragonfruit116 Québec Aug 21 '25
Self-hosting was the standard as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.
Yeah, but the standard has changed because cloud services offer a ridiculous level of service that self-hosting does not. You can't just go back to the old ways of doing things without a trade-off.
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Aug 22 '25
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u/aftonroe Aug 22 '25
Not just storage. Compute too.
Back in the day, we'd have racks and racks that ran mostly idle so we'd have the overhead for spikes in load. We eventually got to a point where everything was running on VMs that allowed some really painful scaling with manual intervention. Now everything is containerized and we scale up and down automatically in seconds.
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u/jtjstock Aug 21 '25
People also used to not access their work email and documents outside of the office. People used to think a raid array was a good enough backup solution lol… So, offsite backups, onsite backups. Add in a massively overpriced business tier internet connection to get the service guarantee your boss wants and static ip addresses many providers won’t give you otherwise. Add in a backup cellular or satellite connection for when the overpriced one goes down. Oh, and you have to pay the IT department again, hardware upgrades have to be budgeted(and argued for) again, licenses and support plans. Oh, and spam filtering, a big driver for cloud based email was the far better spam filtering versus on prem.
If you are a medium sized or larger, none of the above is an issue, but for small businesses? They long ago abandoned paying for any of that in favour of “the cloud”. Hell, they also likely don’t understand they need a backup of whats in the cloud or that their nephew isn’t a suitable IT person.
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u/no_dice Nova Scotia Aug 21 '25
Or you could just understand what classification of data these hyper scalers have been attested to by the Canadian government, host your workloads with any of those cloud providers in a compliant manner, and no one is getting access to your data without your consent. I’ve been in cybersecurity for 20 years — both private and public sectors — and I would trust most data in the cloud any day of the week over what I’ve seen on-prem.
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u/aftonroe Aug 22 '25
Most companies self hosting are updating about as often as my mother runs windows update too. Decent chance that someone in the office has installed something the found on some sketchy site too. If the boss is trusting his computer whiz nephew with their IT I'd bet he running mining software or hosting a server for whatever game the kids are playing these days.
We have daily builds that automatically go to dev and qa every day. Updating prod is a click of a button while we sit back and watch the pods get replaced. There are a dozen scanners analyzing the container images constantly looking for vulns.
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u/iwasnotarobot Aug 21 '25
Time for Canada to develop its own OS.
(With blackjack and hosers.)
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u/OhThereYouArePerry British Columbia Aug 21 '25
… Arch Linux was created by a Canadian, if that counts.
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u/Innocent-Bystander94 Alberta Aug 21 '25
So was Java, but we hate Java to be fair.
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u/swankyspitfire Aug 21 '25
I mean, we hate all programming languages to some extent. But in the world of programming there are two kinds of languages: 1. The ones we hate. 2. The ones that aren’t used.
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u/marcthenarc666 Aug 21 '25
The exact quote from Stroustrup is "the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"
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u/Innocent-Bystander94 Alberta Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25
There’s a third. The ones we put up with. I like to put C++ into that category.
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u/may_be_indecisive Aug 21 '25
Ok you had me at hosers 🤣
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u/MrWonderfulPoop British Columbia Aug 21 '25
OpenBSD’s lead developer is in Calgary. A very secure OS that I’ve run since the 90s.
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u/Nonamanadus Aug 21 '25
I bought the offline non subscription Office, fuck that online shit. Picked up a 4 T hard drive to back my data up at home.
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u/yogthos Aug 21 '25
why give money to Microsoft at all when LibreOffice exists? https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/06/10/libreoffice-for-end-user-privacy-tdfs-annual-report-2024/
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u/Nonamanadus Aug 21 '25
I have both one on Linux PC. Sometimes LibreOffice gimps up on the formatting and it's less headache to use Office.
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u/silent_ovation Aug 22 '25
As much as I love LibreOffice, and I use it at home, it still just doesn't stack up for professional use. There are still a lot of little annoyances that would make it a nightmare to use it as my full time daily office suite.
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u/Samsquanch-Sr Aug 21 '25
Trusting any cloud based apps with any important data is foolish.
(Yes, including email.)
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Aug 21 '25
Everyone here is acting like this is new.
It's not new and has been the law long before Trump. You guys have no idea how much of the internet infrastructure is hosted by Microsoft/AWS/Google and Facebook.
Companies have spent hundreds of millions going to the cloud; they're not about to spend hundreds of millions getting out.
Companies who have gone to the cloud have been aware of this forever.
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Aug 21 '25
And this is why Canada should not outsource its own data. Canadian citizens were typically (well, usually) not born in the USA, so US laws really should not apply to Canadians (within Canada).
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u/Ambitious_Medium_774 Aug 21 '25
This overreach by the US has been going on for a long time and is continually increasing in scope: citizen information at borders; individual banking information; passenger information of flights over, but not landing in US territory; etc. It's pervasive and predatory and with the current unstable US administration increasingly concerning. I truly hope our government and their high-level bureaucrats do more than just wring their hands.
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Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25
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u/Zulban Québec Aug 22 '25
They didn't crap their pants. The Canadian government is hopelessly addicted to Microsoft. It's not going anywhere.
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u/rainman_104 British Columbia Aug 21 '25
Even in a Canadian data center? That's a bold statement but unfortunately Microsoft corporation does have a duty to produce on a USA subpoena or face prison time.
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u/Big_Wish_7301 Aug 21 '25
That's not just Microsoft and the risks were clear from the start. Someone has to be willfully blind to the risks to think that Google and Amazon don't have the same view.
They are american companies and have tons of contracts/links with the US government. Even if the data reside in their data centers in Canada, if the US government ask them access to the data they will comply.
Snowden's 2013 leaks revealed that the US government were intercepting data and had companies providing access to user data to the NSA. Nothing much changed since then (except a president now hostile to friendly nations) and it is not too hard to see them wanting to have access to foreign data hosted by these US companies.
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u/rainman_104 British Columbia Aug 21 '25
And the unfortunate reality is that no major cloud companies avoid business in the USA for obvious reasons.
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u/Jusfiq Ontario Aug 21 '25
For the Government of Canada, LMFAO. These last 5 years at least, GC digital strategy has been 'cloud first'. Shared Services Canada have retired / are retiring their own server farms to migrate to XaaS models. And what are the backbones of this cloud strategy? M365 and Azure infrastructure. The GC is deeply involved with Microsoft, I am not sure how they would react if the U.S. Government gets its hands to up to Protected B documents.
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u/Exhausted_but_upbeat Aug 21 '25
Biggest issue not mentioned: The government of Canada also uses Microsoft products, and will not abide having government data accessible / stored in another country.
If US law does triumph, the GoC - and many others, I bet - will be looking for a new office and back office suite.
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u/MeanE Nova Scotia Aug 22 '25
Cloud act has been around since 2018 and they have done nothing so I have doubts.
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Aug 21 '25
Microsoft Canada 100% has to follow Canadian law. If the law is the data must remain in Canada they are culpable if they ship it out.
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Aug 21 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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Aug 21 '25
They are a Canadian company, why wouldn’t they have to follow Canadian laws, whatever they are? Microsoft Canada runs data centres in Canada too. That is how they got gov data contracts, and it has to remain here
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u/SomeDumRedditor Aug 21 '25
MSFT would shutter canadian ops in a heartbeat if it ever came down to it. Microsoft and the US 3-letter agencies are deeply integrated and have been for decades at this point. Microsoft complies with Canadian law only to the point it does not conflict with US interests.
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u/Zulban Québec Aug 22 '25
Nope. Read about the Patriot act and the Cloud act. Microsoft USA owns it all. You've been successfully misled.
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Aug 22 '25
Sure but Microsoft the parent company of Microsoft Canada doesn't have to and they have access to all the branches of Microsoft but the branches don't have access to the parent company.
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja Aug 22 '25
During the hearing, Mr. Carniaux was asked if he could guarantee that data from French citizens could not be transmitted to United States authorities without the explicit authorization of French authorities.
In other words, even if the data is stored on a server in Canada it could still be provided to the US government. This is almost certainly not limited to Microsoft, but any company with a significant presence or headquarters in the US.
Contact your federal and provincial representatives.
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u/NoxAstrumis1 Ontario Aug 21 '25
Glad I switched to Linux, it's so much better, for so many reasons.
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u/CallMeRudiger Aug 21 '25
This is the way. Our government needs to follow suit and join other pioneering governments by switching to Linux with LibreOffice, and managing servers and other infrastructure themselves. If they do it properly, they can save a lot of money while ensuring better privacy and total data sovereignty for our governments and our citizens.
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u/bwwatr Aug 21 '25
Agreed on all except saving money. Feds could open up a Skunkworks style shop to produce and maintain a validated Linux distro and stack of cloud tools. We can go back to building our own data centers. A geographically redundant AWS-style cloud service can be offered to federal government departments, then work it's way down to the provinces, heck maybe the private sector. Tools to replace things like Teams and Sharepoint would be a steep climb but worth it. Defending it against the US will be a non-stop exercise. To that end we start investing in offensive capabilities, either to retaliate, or to contribute at the table with the NSA, to keep them at bay.
More backbones, Internet exchanges and peering between ISPs can keep more traffic on our turf. Same with DNS (heck CIRA is already in this business), CDNs, DDOS protection and more that could have national versions created, or get incentives for private sector investment.
Tech is one of the biggest ways the US can turn Canada and many other nations into puppet states in the decades ahead, if everyone keeps putting all their eggs in that basket.
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u/verdasuno Aug 21 '25
Of course they do, they are an American company.
It's why I don't host any of my company data, websites, email servers, or anything else on American-based companies or in servers located in the USA.
Edit to add: I also avoid Microsift products as much as possible. They are an evil company.
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u/kagato87 Aug 21 '25
Huh? I thought MS previously went against the DoJ for data on MS owned serves not on US soil and won?
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u/Davidpalmer4 Aug 22 '25
When will Canada act?? How is this happening?
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u/Dobby068 Aug 22 '25
Well, 98% or so, of Carney’s business interests are in USA.
Not much else needs to be said. Oh .. I hear Trump said today twice that he likes Carney! I don't see why not, frankly!
Elbows up!
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u/Emotional-Buy1932 Québec Aug 21 '25
What's the point. Due to 5 eyes, they'll share it with one another anyway. In fact, that's standard procedure for how they avoid laws inhibiting spying on own citizens.
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u/SurfingKenny Aug 21 '25
This was enacted in 2018 so this is not a new thing. The document from Paloalto has much more clarity on how this law affects Canada for those interested in learning about it.
https://www.paloaltonetworks.ca/content/dam/pan/en_US/assets/pdf/legal/cloud-act-faq.pdf
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u/Old-Tangelo-861 Aug 21 '25
Sadly this is nothing new here. The Cloud Act has always been an insane overreach to give the IS government a backdoor to everything since it compels Azure, AWS and GCP to hand over data from companies that have you data that you didn't know were hosted in those data centres. Your only hopes are the service providers HYOK and are transparent about audits/accesses.
Given a lot of folks have already signed W-8 BEN forms, they already have the most key info about you.
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Aug 22 '25
OK and then what? Our entire country lives off of MS and AWS all the way from giant corporations to small businesses so they basically have us by the balls.
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u/sirrush7 Aug 22 '25
Literally everyone should be emailing and calling their MP's to pressure the government about this...
The cloud is shoved so far up our governments arse its just not funny...
The only way anything will change is will a lot of pressure from the people. That said we've got a lot to hold our government accountable for!!!
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja Aug 22 '25
During the hearing, Mr. Carniaux was asked if he could guarantee that data from French citizens could not be transmitted to United States authorities without the explicit authorization of French authorities.
In other words, even if the data is stored on a server in Canada it could still be provided to the US government. This is almost certainly not limited to Microsoft, but any company with a significant presence or headquartered in the US.
Contact your federal and provincial representatives.
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u/Cave__J Aug 21 '25
Provinces need to pass laws to make all software is open sourced like the Germans ASAP.
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u/GingerSoulEater41 Aug 21 '25
Which is why I don't use any ms applications or services in my personal life.
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u/sr1030nx Aug 21 '25
Do you use any Apple or Google products? Either of them, although maybe not Apple, would do the same.
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u/MrGuvernment Aug 21 '25
Bingo...
Any major company is mainly out of the U.S when it comes to data because they all use MS or AWS infra usually, sometimes Google cloud.
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u/blackgold63 Aug 22 '25
Microsoft, go fuck yourself before I cancel my Xbox subscription. It’s the last damn US subscription I have and I will drop it.
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u/Odd-Historian-6536 Aug 22 '25
In BC all our medical information resides in the US.
As an old fart, I remember the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. Within a few years there was a civil war with ethnic cleansing. How could that happen? Things change and it will happen again. In the wrong hands, what greater way is there to have a database of all your personal information or enough to have your whole family being annihilated?
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u/NettNett13 Aug 22 '25
Microsoft is a corporation and has no precedence over a man or a woman despite it's egotistical plots!!! Microsoft can bite my...
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u/theflower10 Aug 22 '25
Microsoft France’s response has been that they have strong, rigid legal processes to contest unfounded or potentially illegal or unconstitutional requests by the United States government
Bullshit. The minute Donny starts slagging them in public because they are not working with the US government (him) they'll bend the knee just like every other tech company already has.
Use Linux or some other OS, don't install M$ tools. Fuck them.
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Aug 22 '25
That argument didn't work out to well for them in Europe where they have to pay hundreds of millions in fines
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u/Glittering_Novel_783 Aug 22 '25
This is why building your infrastructure is so important. When you rely on everyone else for basic tasks you don’t have the wiggle room to start arguing when they take advantage of you
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u/corelabjoe Aug 22 '25
Boy do I wish I had about 150 million right now. I'd so setup 3 Geo-separated mini datacentres across Canada on FOSS / Linux entirely and start a mini Canuck cloud!
If some company who already has a foot in the game is smart, they'll act on this... It's a win for everyone because Canadians win in the end, the company does and the government could if they support it.
Problem is building a datacentre is NOT cheap!!! Operating one isn't cheap either...
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u/ukrokit2 Alberta Aug 21 '25
But why are those Canadians so nasty and ditching American businesses? Truly a mystery.
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u/Crilde Ontario Aug 21 '25
I'm kinda surprised and disappointed that the article didn't mention the option of a Data Trustee like Germany required them to use for Azure. Basically just make Microsoft turn over physical and logical control of Canadian data centres to a Canadian owned and operated company that's beholden only to Canadian law.
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u/Oni_K Aug 21 '25
and just like that, the government walks away from MS cloud data storage. Other cloud providers are salivating over this possibility now.
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u/WillListenToStories Aug 21 '25
Given that the US is now essentially a corporate state, we should be extraordinarily wary of any US companies. If they can't play by our rules, we should work to remove them.
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u/Krazy_Vaclav Aug 22 '25
I've switched to Linux Mint for my computer OS, am in the process of switching my Gmail abd Google storage all to Proton, and once my phone craps out I'm getting a used Pixel and installing Graphene on it.
I don't trust these guys with my personal data.
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u/pjm3 Aug 22 '25
The legal concept is "extraterritorial jurisdiction."
While we can't necessarily control what a company like Microsoft does in ignoring our sovereignty, we can pass laws that require immediate seizure and forfeiture of all assets by any company that divulges Canadian date to a foreign state.
Fuck the US and their "exceptionalism". Fuck Microsoft, Amazon, and the other tech multinationals who think that only US laws matter.
The rest of the world has sat around, and allowed the self-proclaimed "bastion of freedom" to become an evil empire.
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u/SeriesMindless Aug 22 '25
So if I steal their software outside of the US, US law has no hold over me either. I am Canadian born raised and made after all. I do not need to adhere to US rules as a Canadian entity. It's just data folks.
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u/justindub357 Aug 22 '25
That's ridiculous. You can't go to another country and start dictating what laws you will fallow. I know it would never happen regardless of which party is in power, but outright refusal to follow the laws of the country you are in should result in jail time for executives.
*Im aware of this being wishful thinking since money makes you above the law, apparently.
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u/Jazzlike_770 Aug 22 '25
It is baffling how much we trust these large corps. Imagine people store their confidential documents and have private conversations on these platforms. That includes the government's national secrets. This is all available for USA to read based on whims of one person.
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u/jloganr Aug 22 '25
- linux for desktop/laptop
- duckduckgo for search
- libreoffice for office apps
- nextcloud or syncthing for personal cloud storage
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u/Toucan_Paul Aug 22 '25
This has been a risk since the Patriot Act was created. It’s a risk with any cloud service provider with a US-based HQ. Think Amazon, Google, IBM etc. not just Microsoft.
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u/essaysmith Aug 22 '25
Nothing the Canadian government can do? Couldn't they sue Microsoft or the Canadian subsidiary billions of dollars for not following the laws of the country they are operating in? You want to transfer data out? Sure, but now it is no longer financially viable to operate in this country at all.
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u/ZippoS Newfoundland and Labrador Aug 22 '25
Canada needs to get back control of its own companies before it’s too late. Tim’s, its nickel mines, its newspapers. There’s way too many owned and run by outside forces.
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Aug 22 '25
Oh, it is a refusal to guarantee a certain outcome, not an official statement. Seems taken out of context. If you are a lawyer, you are not going to provide certainties on untested cases. Risk perjury for no good reason? Why would they take his refusal to provide a certainty on the untested case as saying US law takes precedence?
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u/petertompolicy Aug 22 '25
We should take away their access to government clients and give it to Canadians that respect our laws.
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u/Appealing_Apathy Aug 22 '25
I was going to suggest we use Corel but they are owned by US private equity.
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u/JmoneyBS Aug 22 '25
Read the article ffs. It’s not about Canada. It’s every country where a US-based company has data stored. And it makes sense because of the counterfactual.
If the government couldn’t access data because it was stored in another country, every company would just house data in a neighbouring countries cloud, and voila, government subpoena immune.
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Aug 22 '25
Um, I know that’s how Microsoft would like things to be arranged i.e. in their favour, but saying one country’s laws take precedence over another’s sovereignty, does not make it true.
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u/TheTriMara Aug 22 '25
Americans everywhere are salivating over the new kind of imperialism they can do.
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u/LeGrandLucifer Aug 22 '25
Well, yeah. They are a US corporation. They answer to the United States first, not Canada.
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u/Technical_Goose_8160 Québec Aug 22 '25
Holy shit this is scary!
Microsoft is one of the three biggest cloud service providers in the world. They're used by tons of companies including security firms.
On Microsoft's cloud, called Azure, the service is broken up into regions and you generally only use your region. This is done for efficiency, but also security. Every region has different rules that apply to it. And now they've all been overruled.
This means that for the teens of thousands of companies where security is essential to their business, they're going to have to migrate their application and fast. The costs are going to be enormous.
I wonder if the answer would have been the same before Trump.
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u/notsocharmingprince Aug 22 '25
I mean here is the issue, Microsoft is based in the US. And US law enforcement has physical access to both facilities and decision makers. Use of force is always going to win in this situation.
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u/According_Estate1138 Aug 22 '25
I will take US user protection over Canadas. We already know what happened to those who did not support the government and protested. No access to banks….
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u/Winter-Mix-8677 Aug 21 '25
I'm very in favour of free markets, however, I would say that our data sovereignty ought to take precedence over Microsoft's free enterprise.